


reveries

by bloodletter



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: M/M, Obsession, Possibly Unrequited Love, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-14 03:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15379869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodletter/pseuds/bloodletter
Summary: That’s the way it felt then: like the way they were outside of the park was the reversal, and this the reality.





	reveries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M J Holyoke (wholeyolk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/gifts).



(What would become the park was a fixed allotment of land, made up of a mixture of natural formations and terraformed earth. There were ancient stone basins alongside great mesas that had been built in days.

“I suppose it’s different for you,” Ford said, “Having grown up in this country. To me, these landscapes have always seemed like fantasy. There was certainly nothing in my childhood to accustom me to the expanse, or the colour, or the heat.”

Arnold emitted the ghost of a laugh. “Well, I don’t know if I’m much more adjusted to it. I didn’t exactly spend my younger days fording the Rio Grande.” Neither of them were young men, even then, and their trek into the centre of their new kingdom wasn't easy on the knees. Arnold took a few more steps through the sand, regained his breath, and continued, “No, I don’t know that I could consider myself an expert on any environment without air-conditioning.”

“Fair enough,” Ford said, and chanced a look back at the man’s face. Arnold was looking straight down the path ahead of them, and so Ford wasn't caught out in his gaze. The sun, he couldn't help but notice, looked well on him.)

-

The most crucial part of their work was the examination of others. Arnold was a master of it. It wasn't empathy. Nothing about the whole enterprise would work if they felt everything the hosts felt. They had to know how to read the tells of others, pick up on the most minute of their unconscious gestures, and instrumentalize them. Ascribe constants and variables to feeling.

This broke down, of course, when it was just the two of them. On the one hand, they never had just one conversation at once; it was always two running alongside each other, the verbal and the nonverbal. On the other, Ford was never quite sure he had the full measure. He hadn't had much experience not feeling like the smartest person in a given room.

Neither had Ford ever found his work conditional on another specific person. It was disconcerting. Arnold operated on another level than the rest of them. A philosopher, not a pragmatist. After his son faded away in that hospital bed, it was as if Arnold was on the edge of slipping away from it all. Ford had no children of his own, couldn't extend the understanding of one father to another. The simple fact of the matter was that even then, before things had really progressed, he knew the project would be nothing without him, and that, were they to leave their work unfinished, it would haunt him for the rest of his life. 

And if Arnold were handsome, well. Ford was only human.

-

(The sun fell behind the canyon walls, and they made camp.

From the other bedroll, Arnold said, “Tell me about your family.”

“Are you sure?”

Arnold nodded.

“There’s not much to tell. I don’t consider myself much of a family man. My work is my legacy.”

“Well, unless there’s someone’s beaten us to the punch, you had to have come from somewhere.”

That startled a laugh out of him. He turned to look back at Arnold. “Why are you so interested?”

Arnold’s gaze remained fixed at the sky above him. “I just think it’s telling, where people come from.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to make me into one of your theories.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Arnold replied, and there was something in his tone Robert couldn’t quite decode. Elusive as ever. He turned back to the sky. “I still can’t believe this is all... real. It’s so bright, it looks like a projection screen. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“ _O, swear not by the moon, the fickle moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circle orb_.”

“ _Lest that thy love prove likewise variable?_ ”

“Correct. Very good, Arnold.”

“ _Twelfth Night?_ ”

“ _Romeo and Juliet._ ”

“Ah. I should’ve known. You prefer the tragedies.” Arnold did smile, then; even through the darkness and the obscuration of his beard, Ford could make out the wrinkle in his cheek. 

He didn’t say that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done something like this, talked into the weird hours of the night with the warm weight of another person next to him. Like children still so enamoured with life they’d try and cheat their bodies out of sleep, not wanting to lose even a moment of consciousness. He was surprised to be feeling this way it all, but if it were to happen with anyone, it would be Arnold. It hadn’t been anything so trite as love at first sight, but Ford remembers what must have been their third conversation, carried on for most of a day, the rest of the world fading into the background in the face of such pure communication. As if seeing into each other's dreams showed them their own selves, as if the mirror had flipped into the way things were really were. That’s the way it felt then, only heightened: like the way they were outside of the park was the reversal, and this the reality.)

-

He'd suggested it on a whim, almost a joke. Arnold's productivity hadn't slowed (if anything, the opposite). He hardly left the office. No, Ford suggested it in the first place just to get some kind of reaction out of Arnold, anything, just to prove he still possessed the power to move him.

“We need time without distractions,” Ford had said, and tried to dull the edge of desperation in his tone. “The world out here… it moves at a different speed than what people like you and I need. Arnold, please. Let’s make a retreat of it. It needn’t be forever. A year or two. We'll go first, and then we'll bring the team out with us.”

It took some time, but he agreed. The teams, the equipment, and everything else came in time, but first, it was the two of them on the range, walking toward the horizon. Acquainting themselves with their domain.

Ford was right, as he so often was. It wasn’t forever. It was three years sequestered in a mechanical idyll, and, for a time, the best years of his life.

-

(The night sky was bright and desolate, and their bodies were so close. “Tell me you won’t shy away from me if I do this, Arnold.”

“Robert.” His eyes shone with desperation. He looked as if he was pleading with Ford, though whether it was a plea to touch him or a plea to leave him alone was unclear. “I can’t…”

“You can. There’s nothing wrong with this. Do you trust me?”

He looked so wretched and lost, brows furrowed, biting into his bottom lip. His hand worried at his own sleeve, kneading at the fabric as a proxy.

“Yes. You know I do.”

“Then let me.”

There was very little distance between them to start with; the desert after dark is cold, and neither of them had spent much time in the wilderness.

His hands moved over Arnold, trying to memorize his shape, catalogue the most minute of his gestures for further use. The way he flinched away from his own pleasure before relaxing into it. The coarseness of his beard against Ford’s cheek when he leaned over to speak directly into his ear. “Don’t think, if you can manage it,” knowing full well that it was an impossible request for a man like Arnold.

Arnold thought so, too, from the way he laughed, almost, replied, “Don’t try and fool me, Robert, I know you’re analysing me.”

“You’d be disappointed in me if I weren’t,” Ford retorted, but even so—he moved up off where he’d laid on the ground to look down into Arnold’s eyes, wide and dark and reflecting the moon back up at him, and for a few brief moments there was nothing in Ford’s mind but wonder at the fact someone on the Earth could exist so perfectly, and waiting for him to find. For a few, heavy, brilliant seconds, the only thoughts in Ford’s mind were two: _Ah, so when we code the hosts to feel love as a cornerstone, does it still come on as such a surprise?,_ and, _You know I’m going to keep you, now; we’ve made this together and you’re mine.)_

-

He had thought about it since they first met. No, that's not quite true—it was some time not too much long after. He had thought about it for a while, but it took until they'd been in seclusion for some time before Ford begun to sketch him. Specifically: what he'd look like on the inside. It was a particular challenge, designing a replica of such a man. The workings of the mind and body must be reflected in a marriage of form and function, from graceful hydraulics to a melancholy set of the mouth.

He didn't show Arnold the sketches. He might, someday, but for now they were too revealing, too overwhelming in their detail, their likeness. Arnold had made for Ford a replica of his family, frozen in time; the Robert there was a child, a more perfect version than ever existed. The Arnold host in Ford's notes was mirrored too carefully on its counterpart.

He left it, sometimes for months at a time. Arnold lost himself in the work. It was _their_ work, they did it together, so Ford didn't mind seeing him chewed up in that way. Arnold's mind hadn't dulled, and they were in it together. But sometimes Arnold seemed to be alone on the moon, neither looking for nor receptive of a message from the planet below, and on those days Ford pulled out the draft paper and drew.


End file.
